Epics and Odes

Epics are big screen songs: the musical equivalent of Cecil B. De Mille or Norman Jewison. An epic sets its own guidelines. It can celebrate a national event, and enhance the place or people it portrays. The reverse does not hold. Try to script it to convey a national message, and it can descend into pure propaganda.

The best known American is The Battle of New Orleans written by Jimmy Driftwood to interest students in the War of 1812. In this he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. Johnny Horton’s recording of the song reached #1 on the charts in 1959 and won a Grammy the following year.

In 2001 it won a Grammy Hall of Fame Award as one of the most important Songs of the Century. It has become a cheer and a chant at US sporting events, with its chorus:

We fired our guns and the British kept a’comin
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’ on
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Other American epic songs are Remember the Alamo, recorded by Johnny Cash, about the legendary Davy Crockett in the Texas Revolt against Mexico. It became the theme of a movie. Another, almost-epic and movie was The P. T. 109 written by Burch and Wilkin and recorded by Jimmy Dean about the wartime exploits of John F. Kennedy.

Canadians have no battle songs of this stature. The closest are two by Stan Rogers. Barrett’s Privateers is, by definition, an encounter on a private scale. The chorus sums up the story:

God damn them all! I was told
We’d cruise the seas for American gold
We’d fire no guns, shed no tears.
Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett’s Privateers.

The second, The Nancy, is about a battle on the Great Lakes in the War of 1812—this one neither from a British nor American viewpoint, but from that of a fictitious Canadian, Alexander MacIntosh, whose schooner is commandeered for a fight between the two warring powers. The story is summed up in the last verse:

Oh, military gentlemen, they bluster, roar and pray.
Nine sailors and the Nancy, boys, made fifty run away.
The powder in their hair that day was power sent their way
By poor and ragged sailor men, who swore that they would stay…

There are older Canadian folk songs about the uprisings of 1837, the Louis Riel-led uprisings of 1870 and 1885 (The Northwest Rebellion), and about the westward march of the North West Mounted Police (today the RCMP—this would at best be considered “para-military.”

However, the best known Canadian epic song is not about a battle but about the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Gordon Lightfoot’s Canadian Railroad Trilogy begins:

There was a time in this fair land
When the railroad did not run
And the wild majestic mountains
Stood alone against the sun
Long before the white man
And long before the wheel
When the green dark forest
Was too silent to be real.

But time has no beginnings
And history has no bounds
As to this verdant country
They came from all around
They sailed upon her waterways
And they walked the forests tall
Built the mines and mills and factories
For the good of us all …

The first two lines of the second verse illustrate two points made in earlier postings here: (1) Canadians have a different sense of time from many other peoples (an organic Kairos rather than the technical Chronos) and (2) Canadian epic songs emphasize geography and place rather than the individual heroes of historical events.

The CPR story had many noteworthy figures: politicians, bankers and financiers, surveyors and engineers. Lightfoot’s Trilogy does not mention any of them by name. Instead he speaks of the participants generically:

And when the young man’s fancy was turning to the spring
The railroad men grew restless for to hear the hammers ring
Their minds were overflowing with the visions of their day
With many a fortune lost and won, and many a debt to pay.

And he devotes a whole section to the laborers, especially those from overseas:

We are the navvies who work upon the railway
Swinging our hammers in the bright blazing sun
Living on stew and drinking bad whiskey
Bending our backs til the railroad is done.

Lines about swinging hammers and blazing suns are easily clichéd, as the Smothers Brothers did skillfully in Cabbage, their parody of American railroad building.

This does not happen here, because of the seriousness and respect with which Lightfoot treats his characters. The shipping firm built by another Canadian, Samuel Cunard, later coined the slogan “Half the fun is getting there.” Lightfoot takes his time, treating the builders as the centerpiece of his narrative, and not merely a means to an end.

The other historic epic Lightfoot wrote was The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald. This is about water, not land, transport. Set on Lake Superior, it is international in spread: about an ill-fated ship that plied between Canada and the United States.

The geography that permeates the finest Canadian songs is too wide a spread to be covered in a single posting and is paralleled by an equally broad cultural spread. We’ll look at these tomorrow under the topic, “Winter, Language and Connecting across the Spaces.”